Health Briefs

Education appears to have a powerful anti-aging effect: a college degree, for example, can confer 10 additional years of healthy life on its holder compared with someone without one.

The finding came out of a study of 569 people who have been followed since they were adolescents in the 1920s. By age 65, 25 percent of those without a college education were dead and 20 percent were disabled, a level of death and disability reached by the college-educated group at age 75, said Dr. George E. Vaillant of Harvard.

College-educated men were more likely to control such risk factors as smoking, alcohol abuse, excess weight and lack of physical activity, he reported in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Study: Epidural does not increase risk of Caesarean

Contrary to what many obstetricians believe, epidural analgesia given to women to relieve pain during delivery does not increase the risk of Caesarean sections.

Nor does it increase the risk of a difficult birth, said Dr. Jun Zhang of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Zhang's study involved more than 1,000 women who gave birth at the Tripler Army Medical Center from 1993 through 1995, a period in which the epidural analgesia rate for first-time mothers increased to 84 percent from 1 percent. No changes in delivery procedures occurred during this transition period.

Efforts to educate ATV users being renewed

Renewed efforts to educate users, especially adolescents, on how to use all-terrain vehicles are needed to curb the increasing rate of U.S. deaths from accidents, now at 267 per year.

Males accounted for 87 percent of the deaths, Helmkamp reported in the American Journal of Public Health.

Genetic map of helpful bacterium completed

British scientists have completed a genetic map of a common soil bacterium, a step that could help scientists develop new antibiotics and other medicines.

Bacteria called Streptomyces are used to make most antibiotics and many other naturally produced compounds, including anti-cancer agents. Scientists, however, do not know precisely how these germs operate.

The map provides clues to the bacterium's mechanism and will help scientists find new antibiotics and anti-cancer drugs, the researchers said.